


sweetie

by Quecksilver_Eyes



Series: i look at you and there's no speech left in me [3]
Category: Julie and The Phantoms (TV)
Genre: Character Study, F/F, F/M, Introspection, and aches for all that she has lost, and grieves, and loses julie, carrie and julie are exes dont change my mind, in which carrie loses things, in which carrie struggles, trans carrie bc i say so
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-13
Updated: 2020-10-13
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:09:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,427
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26995699
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quecksilver_Eyes/pseuds/Quecksilver_Eyes
Summary: “Sweetie”, Julie had said, when Carrie was still at home underneath that roof and laid out on her sheets, giggling into Julie’s pillows. “Sweetie, you don’t know the half of it.” Her voice was a soft, soft thing tangled in Carrie’s wig, draped over a chair in a corner somewhere. There was a tune of something blooming on Julie’s piano, and the beat of Julie’s kisses settled against Carrie’s ribcage, wedged into that room and into their lives.Julie was all smiles, with those dark eyes, with that gap between her teeth, and her mother’s songs stretched across them, and Carrie lay there, giggling, and with Julie’s lips and colours draped across her skin. “Sweetie”, Julie had said, and reached for her, her hands still smeared with the raspberries they’d picked together, with their laughter like a necklace strung about their throats. Carrie hadn’t flinched, hadn’t pulled back.Julie had laughed and Rose was still alive, then.
Relationships: Carrie Wilson & Nick (Julie and the Phantoms), Carrie Wilson/Nick (Julie and the Phantoms), Julie Molina & Carrie Wilson, Julie Molina/Carrie Wilson
Series: i look at you and there's no speech left in me [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2015690
Comments: 16
Kudos: 55





	sweetie

Nick is smiling, with those soft eyes, directly at Julie and her scowl and there’s something in Carrie that aches at the sight of it. There are dimples in his cheek and a softness around his mouth that makes something in her stomach curdle. Nick smiles at Julie, and Julie looks at him, blurred around the edges, drowning in grief, and there’s something rotting in Carrie’s bones.

She scowls at him, and he shrugs, with that same smile, with his brows furrowed and his hands outstretched for her and all the ways she has long since scraped her bones clean of every single one of Julie’s words.

“Sweetie”, Julie had said, when Carrie was still at home underneath that roof and laid out on her sheets, giggling into Julie’s pillows. “Sweetie, you don’t know the half of it.” Her voice was a soft, soft thing tangled in Carrie’s wig, draped over a chair in a corner somewhere. There was a tune of something blooming on Julie’s piano, and the beat of Julie’s kisses settled against Carrie’s ribcage, wedged into that room and into their lives.

Julie was all smiles, with those dark eyes, with that gap between her teeth, and her mother’s songs stretched across them, and Carrie lay there, giggling, and with Julie’s lips and colours draped across her skin. “Sweetie”, Julie had said, and reached for her, her hands still smeared with the raspberries they’d picked together, with their laughter like a necklace strung about their throats. Carrie hadn’t flinched, hadn’t pulled back.

Julie had laughed and Rose was still alive, then.

Now, Nick looks at Julie like the patch on her trousers might actually make her shine as bright as the summer sun, as if all the world’s secrets were hidden behind her lips. “I’m being nice”, he says, as he reaches for her with his dripping hands, as if he could somehow water her bloom with them, and stop the grief blocking her lungs and her music. As if, if he just tried hard enough, she might walk up to a stage again, all glitter and laughter; tooth-gapped and bouncing – and sing, again. He looks at her as if his smile alone could make her piano uncurl and Carrie’s jaw unclench. “I’m being nice, Carrie. This is what having friends is like.”

Flynn calls her demon and Nick is smiling. Julie doesn’t look at her or her words and Nick is smiling, smiling, ever smiling, looking at her. “You’re not dating her”, Carrie says, and doesn’t kiss him. Julie’s kisses were bubbling laughter on her lips, the taste of fruit and a heavy summer night contained in the lines on Julie’s palms. Nick kisses her, smiling, and Carrie doesn’t find her laughter.

“No”, he says. “I’m dating you.” He doesn’t look at her, and his hands are cold against her skin.

“You’re selfish”, Julie had said, months ago, when Carrie’s bones were ice and Julie’s eyes were a storm. “You’re selfish and you don’t care about me.” Carrie’s wig lay pink, frayed, on the floor, and her phone vibrated in the back of her shorts. A song, half written, lay sprawled on Julie’s lap. The window was open, and the cold autumn air pooled at Carrie’s back, like the breath of something foul, something dying.

“What?”

“Do you think that writing a stupid song with you is going to fix anything?” Once, Carrie had dropped her dad’s good plates on the kitchen floor in a fit of screaming, sobbing rage. She’d picked up the whole stack and had thrown it at his feet with all the strength a ten year old could manage; tear drowned. The plates had shattered on the cold tiles, and dug into the soles of her feet, her toes, the palms of her hands. Her dad had spent hours pulling them out with the smallest pincers he owned. Julie’s voice felt like the shattering of a whole stack of good porcelain plates.

Rose had died months ago, tucked into this house and Ray’s grief settled firmly in the kitchen, and Julie hadn’t sung a single tune, hadn’t played a single chord. Her voice sat at the edge of something seething and bloodshot and heaving, and Carrie had reached for her, with her voice useless in her throat. Every time she tried opening her mouth, she’d felt like she might choke on all that Rose was, all that she will never be, all that Julie will become without her mother to watch her or hold her in her arms. So she gasped for air, and grasped for Julie, and said nothing at all, brought her songs with her to sing them to her as she stayed silent, and unmoving.

“Do you care at all, Carrie?”

Carrie choked on her words, dripping sickly sweet from her throat back into her lungs.

Now, Nick smiles at her, undimpled, with furrowed brows, with his body angled towards Julie and her voicelessness. Carrie doesn’t kiss him. He doesn’t reach for her. Instead, he looks at Julie and her eyes; world-heavy.

Here’s how Carrie loves Julie:

There’s a meadow just underneath her heart that blooms in blues and reds and pinks, rooted into her bones and into her fluttering stomach. Buried underneath the apple tree, in a hollow cavity, lies a box full of dreams and kisses and Julie’s voice. The sun is high above them and there’s a summer storm settled atop it all, full of laughter, full of light. There’s a doe standing in the tall grass, her ears tilted forwards, her fawn between her legs, dotted white.

Somewhere, something breaks.

Somewhere, something shoots the fawn.

The storm loses its summer and the grass loses all its green, the meadow gives up on all its flowers. The tree is uprooted, now, and there’s a doe in the carnage of it all, frantic and with all this rot clinging to her hooves. The fawn lies, bleeding and dotted red, in between Carrie’s bones.

Nick watches, smiling, his hands dripping wet.

“You know”, Nick says, and reaches for her dad’s good chocolate, “I wish you wouldn’t give Julie such a hard time. She’s really going through something, you know?” He crosses his legs onto the couch, pale grey and freshly cleaned.

Julie opens her mouth and chokes and calls Carrie cruel. Julie sits at that piano, silent, and unmoved, and calls Carrie selfish. Julie stands by the locker, her laughter a string of pearls, and doesn’t say anything when Flynn calls her a demon. Julie stays silent and unmoved and sharp like porcelain shards in Carrie’s skin.

“There’s not much worse in the world than losing your friends”, her father had said, once, when he was in one of his sombre moods, when he would play with his necklace or his bracelets or his rings, and look at Carrie’s estrogen pills like they’re a revelation in her mouth. “You never really heal from it.”

Is it losing Julie if she turns quiet and unmoving and music-less, if she spits at Carrie for the same things she used to kiss her for? Is it loss like three loves dying in tandem, three funerals back to back? Is this Julie standing there, in those patched jeans, with her hair in a ponytail and her life stretched out in front of her or is it just an afterimage for Nick to look at until his lips curl and his eyes shine and Carrie _aches_?

There’s something hidden in Nick’s smile. His words lie stuck on his skin, and Carrie squares her shoulders. “Is she, now?”

Nick frowns. “Yeah.”

Carrie purses her lips. “Pity.”

She works for months on the choreography and the song and the arrangement and the outfits of their gig for the spirit rally. Dirty Candy spends hours sealed away in Carrie’s room, giggling and practicing and dancing until they’re all aching with it all, sugar spun and spent and glowing with excitement. Carrie hands out flyers until she can barely hold her arms up, bares her teeth at Julie and at Flynn until they both turn from her, rolling their eyes.

Julie steps onto the stage with three boys in necklaces and rings and bracelets, and sings her heart out. She glows, up there, like a summer storm burning bright, crackling with sound. Julie doesn’t open her mouth or her music for a year and then, today, in this hall and on this stage, on the back of Carrie’s music, she sings again.

There’s a meadow rotting in Carrie’s stomach and Nick reaches for it.


End file.
